Mississippi's US Senate race is getting national attention after Hyde-Smith videos

At a Monday news conference about an endorsement by the National Right to Life Committee, Gov. Phil Bryant and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith were asked about Hyde-Smith's comments about attending a hanging, captured in a video posted online Sunday.
Luke Ramseth

National money and attention is bound for Mississippi's U.S. Senate runoff race after the release of a video Sunday showing Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith joking about attending a "public hanging" as she praised a supporter.

President Donald Trump is considering another trip to the state to support the senator, sources close to Hyde-Smith confirmed. She continues to deal with fallout over the comment. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has plans to sink $1 million in TV ads supporting Hyde-Smith in the race, Politico reported Wednesday, part of an effort to bolster a race that could be more competitive than expected.

Meanwhile, her opponent Mike Espy, a Democrat, is receiving backing from national groups such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which sent out a fundraising email Monday with the subject line "public hanging." Kamala Harris, the California senator and possible 2020 presidential contender, is expected in Mississippi Saturday in support of Espy.

And the Democrat-supporting Senate Majority PAC on Wednesday announced plans to launch a $500,000 statewide TV ad campaign this week targeting Hyde-Smith on health care and rising insurance premiums — its first investment in the race. "Your healthcare is no game," its catchphrase goes. "But you lose if Cindy Hyde-Smith wins."

The winner of a Nov. 27 runoff between Hyde-Smith and Espy will serve the last two years of a six-year term started by longtime Sen. Thad Cochran, who retired in the spring because of health issues. Both Hyde-Smith and Espy received about 41 percent of the vote in a four-person race Nov. 6 to advance to a runoff.

Hyde-Smith's comment erupted online Sunday, after a short video of her at a Nov. 2 Tupelo rally was released on social media. In praising a supporter at the end of the rally, she said she would "fight a circular saw for him," then stated: "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row."

"If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row"- Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith says in Tupelo, MS after Colin Hutchinson, cattle rancher, praises her.

The president of the NAACP and other leaders sharply criticized it, saying it was insensitive in a state with a long history of racial violence, including more lynchings of African Americans than any other state from 1882 to 1968.

Hyde-Smith and her campaign have not offered an apology or significant explanation for her comment, and the campaign reiterated Wednesday it did not plan to. Hyde-Smith is in Washington, D.C. through Thursday and also refused to answer reporters' questions about it there. The campaign only issued a short statement Sunday that said Hyde-Smith had used an "exaggerated expression of regard, and any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous."

The most controversial ad related to Hyde-Smith's comments thus far was one posted online by the Espy-supporting political action committee PowerPACPlus, which used a photo of a lynching with her superimposed in the crowd. It quickly garnered tens of thousands of views. Both campaigns condemned the ad Wednesday, as did Gov. Phil Bryant, who called it "reprehensible."

"This is the same out-of-state group that is spending millions of dollars promoting Mike Espy and has now taken his campaign to the lowest depths imaginable," Hyde-Smith campaign spokeswoman Melissa Scallan said in a Wednesday statement.

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Espy said while Hyde-Smith's comment had "inflamed passions," he found "the latest ad, which was not produced by my campaign, to also be disturbing and racially divisive." He added: "We need to bring people together in Mississippi, and I am the only one in the race who can do it."

The lynching photo Hyde-Smith is superimposed onto in the ad shows Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were killed in Marion, Indiana, in August 1930. A crowd of white people, some of them grinning, looks on. "This is where Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith would like to be, according to her own words," the ad states, adding racism is "alive and well."

As the ads increase in the coming days, Trump also could be headed back to the state. He held a Mississippi rally for Hyde-Smith on Oct. 3 to endorse her, and is considering another before the Nov. 27 runoff, though plans are not yet finalized.

At the Nov. 2 Tupelo campaign event, Hyde-Smith talked about Trump's wall, and her opposition to birthright citizenship, according to a Nov. 2 Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal article about the event. She hit out at her then-opponent, Republican state Sen. Chris McDaniel, and denied allegations, made by McDaniel and others, that she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2008.

But then she made the "public hanging" remark in praise of a supporter, just as the rally was ending, that would capture the country's attention nine days later when a Louisiana journalist released a short clip of it online.

The Daily Journal, which did not mention the comment in its Nov. 2 story on the rally, reported this week the "hanging" comment had been preceded by another statement in apparent praise of the same supporter: "I would fight a circular saw for him," she said,

While the phrase "fight a circular saw" does appear to be mentioned in several books and articles over the years, the Clarion Ledger could not find in an online search other examples of the "public hanging" phrase she used.

Paul Reed, a University of Alabama professor who specializes in sociolinguistic history, told the New York Times the phrase shows up in American writing in the mid-1800s, and during the civil rights era, including as an "expression of regard," as Hyde-Smith said in her statement. But he added most wouldn't consider using the phrase today.

“It has fallen so far out of favor,” Reed told the Times. “I cannot believe that someone would use that today.”